The 120mm mortars I am referring to are those mounted on some of our gunboats, not anything in use by our ground forces.
Yeah, I know. What I was replying to was the part where you said:
"...it could be assumed that we are currently making use of 60mm and/or 81mm mortars, in addition to our 120mm mortars..."
I try to quote entire paragraphs to reduce the risk of being accused of spaghetti posting; it's become a habit.
In this case, my point was that we have positive confirmation that the Commonwealth ground forces employ mortars of less than 120mm caliber- captured Vick ones, if nothing else. This suggests that our forces have at least some training and experience with such mortars, or it would be impractical to make quick use of them.
Furthermore, I would argue that our ground forces probably do NOT employ 120mm mortars in any great quantity. This is because they are
heavy. A bit of Wikipedia trawling for modern 120mm mortars suggests that the mortar itself is likely to weigh something like 300 pounds; ours would likely weigh more since we'd have to use metallurgy more in line with World War Two than with the modern era. And either for us or for 2020-era people, the shells are going to be weighing somewhere in the vicinity of 40 pounds.
This is heavy enough that infantry will struggle greatly with it on foot. And our military is
not fully motorized so far as I know. As such, it is very likely that any mortars in widespread use by the Commonwealth ground forces are small enough to be
relatively man-portable. A roughly 80mm mortar caliber seems more likely to meet that requirement.
Despite this I wouldn't be surprised if a few 120mm mortars were deployed on land during the Detroit campaign...
by naval detachments. Our gunboats preferentially used 105mm howitzers over the mortar option during the campaign, probably because our howitzers outrange our mortars considerably. It is conceivable that this left a number of mortars "surplus to requirements," with no place to mount them aboard ship. It would be well in keeping with historic naval practices if the excess mortars and any available ammunition were, say, dug in on defensive lines that were deemed unlikely to fall- or important enough that if they
did fall, the risk of the Victorians capturing a handful of heavy mortars they don't make ammunition for wouldn't be the worst of our problems.
Aside from that the only way I can see our ground forces having many 120mm mortars is if it was common practice in the proto-Commonwealth to use that caliber as "siege artillery," vehicle-mobile but not man-portable for conflicts where reasonably heavy weapons could be deployed.
While I do agree that the 25mm is in very limited use, it is also one of the smallest calibers of auto-canon it is practical to make. Furthermore, it is the smallest NATO standard caliber auto-cannon round, and before the collapse was in service with almost every major nation in Western Europe. With all that going for it, it is extremely likely that there are still nations who both use it and would be willing to export it. As such, if we are going to standardize on a light auto-canon the 25 mm is likely to be the best option available.
I mean, perhaps.
On the other hand, there are probably plenty of people who have started manufacturing 23mm ammunition for compatibility Russian-style autocannon (for the same reason that lots of people today make 5.56mm and 7.62mm NATO; the guns sold by the predominant superpower make up a large chunk of the global ammunition market).
Or we might just decide that there is no real compelling reason to standardize on 25mm autocannon, in that we end up having no vehicles where the weight savings for 25mm as opposed to 30-40mm calibers is worthwhile.
The decision will realistically be made by circumstantial factors we cannot predict given the 'resolution limit' of the game as a simulator of actually running a post-Collapse state.
The 40x365mm round is also a NATO standard round, and also in use by almost every major nation in Western Europe. In addition, it is also the smallest round for which we know proximity fuses can be made without using semiconductor-based technology. This means it is likely the smallest round which we can domestically manufacture proximity fused ammunition for. This is highly desirable for an anti-aircraft/anti-small boat/light shore bombardment weapon, all of which are roles a heavy auto-canon may be expected to fulfill.
All true; I wouldn't be surprised to see a 40mm autocannon in the future of our navy- but bear in mind that our future navy is
NOT going to be dominated by home-built designs, in all probability. Ability to domestically manufacture an adequate ammunition variant may be a factor in the calculations of our procurement people, but we're likely to, again, end up making decisions based heavily on what foreign sources we have.
I know you acknowledge this, but it's important to not get too caught up in "what is optimal" as opposed to "we're going to do what is practical."
